Some necessary jargonAt this point I must introduce several terms that will be useful for the
next steps of the argument:
Inference.Some of the ideas you now have about zygoons and
thricklers are called inferences, which means that it is not I who
gave you that information (for instance, that thricklers are
probably made by people rather than found in nature). You
inferredthat from what I said. What goes on in your mind when
you create a new concept is not entirely driven by the input but
[60] by a combination of that input with previous representations.
Default inference. Note how easy it was to agree that zygoons
must be born of other zygoons, or that zygoons are not made
in factories. All you had to do was to "read" what your mental
encyclopedia says about animals in general. That was the
right thing to do. I did not specify that zygoons were excep-
tional in any way. So you just assumed that, at least as a first
approximation, all you know about animals in general applies
to zygoons too. This creates a certain representation of the
new object that is considered true as long as there is no
explicit information to the contrary. An inference produced in
this way is called a default inference. This is analogous with
computers; they function in the way the manufacturers
decided (their "default settings") unless you modify various
parameters.
Expectations. Note that your opinions on zygoons and
thricklers are conjectural. It is after all just possible that
zygoons are really exceptional animals that survive dissection,
never feed or never grow. This is not important for the time
being. We are describing what you now expect of zygoons and
thricklers. We are not discussing whether you are right to
have these expectations. Smart brains consider not just what
happened but why it happened, what might follow and so on.
If you have a brain that produces inferences, you constantly
entertainexpectations.
Ontological categories. This is the most important term here.
Not all concepts are the same. Some very abstract concepts—
such as ANIMAL but also TOOL or PERSON or NUMBER—are
called "ontological categories," to distinguish them from more
RELIGION EXPLAINED